The Cambridge Police Department is scheduled to release the results today of an independent review of the arrest of leading African American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by a white police officer last year. The incident made national headlines and sparked a national debate on race relations that reached all the way to the White House. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree acted as counsel to Professor Gates throughout the...

We discuss the latest in the ongoing US war in Afghanistan, the longest-running war in American history, with Tom Engelhardt, creator and editor of the website TomDispatch and author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. Engelhardt says the US war in Afghanistan has troubling parallels with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan of the 1980s. [includes rush transcript]

We turn now to America’s role in a changing Middle East. Israel has set up an internal inquiry into its deadly attack last month on the Gaza-bound flotilla of humanitarian aid ships. The attack left eight Turks and one Turkish American dead. Meanwhile, Turkey, along with Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel swap agreement with Iran and then voted against a UN Security Council resolution last week that imposed another round of sanctions on...

Israeli President Shimon Peres has denied reports he offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa when he was defense minister in the 1970s. On Sunday, the Guardian newspaper of London published top-secret South African documents revealing that a secret meeting between then-defense minister Shimon Peres and his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha, ended with an offer by Peres for the sale of warheads "in three sizes."...

The pioneering African-American actress, singer, and civil rights activist has died at the age of 91. We speak with James Gavin, author of, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne. Part I of this conversation can be viewed here

Lena Horne enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in film. She was the first black woman to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio. She helped break racial boundaries by acting alongside white entertainers, but she was segregated on screen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South. In the 1950s, she was blacklisted in part because of her friendship with Paul Robeson...

Renowned Chilean novelist Isabel Allende joins us in our studio to talk about her new book, Island Beneath the Sea, her first novel in four years. The story takes readers back 200 years in time to the slave uprising that led to the creation of the world’s first independent black republic, Haiti. Allende also discusses the new Arizona immigration law, the new Chilean president Sebastián Piñera, the earthquake in Chile, and the rise of...

Independent reporter, activist and poet John Ross has been covering social movements in Mexico and Latin America for nearly fifty years. He is the author of ten books; his latest is El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City. Ross moved to Mexico City in the aftermath of the massive 8.1-magnitude earthquake in 1985 and has lived there ever since. [includes rush transcript]

Environmentalists and indigenous communities along the Amazon celebrated an important victory Thursday after a Brazilian judge suspended bidding on the construction of what is slated to be the third largest dam in the world. We speak to Nikolas Kozloff, author of the new book No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet. Kozloff argues that protecting the rainforests of the Amazon from environmental...